Exercise 6 — Find your dead frame

This one runs three weeks and you will not finish it today. Continue the log from Exercise 4 to thirty entries, then sort by frame and count. One of the six will be near zero. That is your dead frame, and the point of the exercise is not to notice it — you will notice it in ten minutes — but to work out what it is costing you, which takes the rest of the three weeks.

Go back through your notes for the people you got least far with this year. Read them for grammar rather than content. The question is whether the weld you kept failing to break is the frame you never pick.

Then drill only that one, for a week, at the expense of the other five.

How to tell if it's any good: a completed version of this has three parts — the count, at least two named cases where the dead frame was the load-bearing one, and a week of logged attempts using it badly. Badly is expected and is not a problem to solve; the take rate on a newly revived frame is poor for about a fortnight. The version that is not any good is the one that ends at the count, because the count is only the observation. Most practitioners' dead frame is Function, and the reason is worth sitting with: Function requires you to say out loud that the thing hurting someone is also serving them, and that sentence is hard to make kind. That difficulty is a craft problem with a solution, and the frame stays dead only as long as you treat the difficulty as a reason.

One caution before you drill it. Some welds are holding the roof up. A person whose identity is currently doing structural work — I'm an addict in recovery, I'm the one who copes — has a Kind frame welded shut on purpose, and your growing ability to break it is not permission to. The question is never whether you can move the boundary. It is whether anything is standing on it.